Category: Organisational Development

We have learned that goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. As a product owner, I apply this in many situation to help the team focus and to make progress. However last week I threw out the SMART goals and got fantastic results because of it.

Effective leaders know their way of communicating have a great impact on how people feel and on the way people work. Destructive communication leads to lower trust and productivity, people who criticise each other and a place where people will primarily look after themselves. In an environment where people communicate constructively on the other hand, there will be a more open and candid atmosphere with higher trust and respect, where it is much easier to solve sensitive issues and where productivity increases.

Once I picked up Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, I could not put it down. This is a wonderfully written book on how to foster high performing teams.

Patrick’s book is written as a novel with Kathryn as newly appointed CEO of DecisionTech, a promising start-up just outside Silicon Valley. She has an executive team of bright, competitive and high performing individuals. Kathryn is brought in because the company is not living up to the owners expectations and they are behind their competitors. It does not take long before she realise how crippled her executive team is. The book is the story of how she is coaching these executives from individuals to a team.

In an earlier post, Who were we?, I wrote about our struggle to identify ourself as a platform company or a product company. Since I wrote that post I have been talking with two different persons who gave great arguments for when you want to stay away from the temptation of building platforms.

Sometimes we stumble on things that will change the way we see and do things. This is certainly true for me when I ran across Appreciative Inquiry. It was really the wording, Appreciative Inquiry, which caught my eye. It tickled my brain’s language centre and although only two words, it communicates affirmation, curiosity, exploration, thoughtfulness and positive energy.